Last week, I bundled my pit bull, Noelle, into her red snowflake sweater and headed to the vet for her routine vaccinations. We were racing against the clock. A winter storm was supposed to hit that evening, and even though it was still morning, it was already cold enough that Noelle was giving me her best pittie pout every time I mentioned going outside.
At the vet’s office, we got the news. Noelle had gained a few pounds.
“One too many pup cups,” I admitted, while she panted happily on the exam room couch, completely unbothered by this revelation about her waistline.
This led to a conversation about dog food. I mentioned I’d been told that kibble alone wasn’t good enough, so I’d started adding wet food to her meals a few times a week. That’s when my vet brought up FreshPet and its clever tagline. “It’s not dog food, it’s food food.”
He made a few offhand comments that stopped me in my tracks, not because of what they meant for Noelle’s diet, but because of what they meant for my work as an educator.
People love FreshPet, he said. They’re drawn to the idea of feeding their dogs something “fresh.” But, if it has a shelf life long enough to sit in store refrigerators for weeks, how fresh is it really? It’s different from kibble that can sit on a shelf for months, sure, but it’s still a manufactured product, not farm-to-table chicken breast you’re cooking daily.
Then he said something that really landed. “The brands that advertise the most are spending their money on marketing, not research. You have to ask yourself, are they selling you a product, or are they actually trying to make high-quality dog food?”
I sat there nodding about dog food while my brain immediately jumped to curriculum.
“It’s Not Curriculum, It’s a Research-Based Learning System”
Sound familiar?
How many times have we sat through professional development where a shiny new program promised to revolutionize our teaching? The materials are glossy. The presentation is slick. The buzzwords are everywhere. Research-based, brain-compatible, data-driven, student-centered.
But, here’s what my vet accidentally taught me to ask. Where’s the money going? Is this company investing in actual research and quality development, or are they investing in convincing me I need their product?
When a curriculum company spends millions on marketing campaigns, fancy websites, promotional materials at conferences, that’s money NOT going into actual research and quality development. These companies aren’t investing in rigorous field testing with diverse student populations, ongoing research into effectiveness, quality control and continuous improvement, or meaningful support for teachers implementing the program.
Just like FreshPet’s tagline distances their product from “dog food,” curriculum companies rebrand ordinary materials to sound premium and different. They’re not just worksheets, they’re “scaffolded learning progressions.” It’s not a reading series, it’s an “integrated literacy system.” The marketing creates just enough distance from what we already have to make us think THIS time it’ll be different.
What If Kibble Was Fine All Along?
Here’s where the dog food metaphor gets even better. I started adding wet food to Noelle’s kibble because I was told kibble alone wasn’t enough. Maybe it wasn’t. But also, maybe the tried-and-true method was actually working just fine, and I got convinced I needed to top it off with something flashy.
How many times have we done this with curriculum? We have solid foundational practices that work. Read-alouds. Math manipulatives. Writing conferences. Collaborative learning. These aren’t glamorous. They don’t come with slick marketing. But they’re the kibble, the reliable foundation that actually nourishes learning.
Then someone convinces us we need to add the wet food. We need the supplemental program. The digital component. The “enhanced” version. And before we know it, we’re second-guessing methods that were working perfectly well because we’ve been sold on the idea that good isn’t good enough anymore.
Sometimes the foundation doesn’t need fancy additions. Sometimes it just needs consistency, quality ingredients, and proper portions.
Questions to Ask Before You Buy
So what do we do? We can’t become curriculum researchers overnight, and we often don’t have final say in what gets adopted anyway. But we can ask better questions.
- Where’s the money going? If this company has massive marketing budgets, what’s left for actual R&D?
- Who did the research? Was it independent researchers or people on the company payroll? Both can be legitimate, but it matters. Remember, “research-based” can mean anything from a rigorous randomized controlled trial to asking some teachers if they liked it and most said yes.
- What population was studied? Research conducted exclusively with middle-class suburban students might not translate to your classroom.
- What’s the track record? Has this company’s previous curriculum actually worked long-term, or do they just keep rebranding and reselling similar materials every few years?
- Do we actually need this? Are we solving a real problem, or have we been convinced that what’s working isn’t good enough?
The Bottom Line
My vet wasn’t saying FreshPet is bad dog food. He was saying I needed to look past the marketing and understand what I was actually buying. Some refrigerated dog foods ARE higher quality. Some DO invest more in research and ingredients than in advertising. But you can’t tell which is which based on the tagline alone.
Same goes for curriculum. Some commercial programs ARE worth the investment. Some DO represent genuine innovation backed by solid research. But “It’s not curriculum, it’s a research-based learning system” is just marketing speak, and we owe it to our students to be more critical consumers than that.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go figure out if Noelle’s weight gain is actually about the dog food, or if it’s just about the pup cups.
This is Part 1 of a two-part series on curriculum decision-making. Part 2 will explore what happens when we keep switching our dog’s food before we even know if it’s working.